


Death at a great distance

by elo_elo



Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: Aftermath of Stockholm Syndrome, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Anxiety, Developing Friendships, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Eventual Smut, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Friend groups, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Group Therapy, Human Trafficking, LIKE SLOW SLOW, Mage Hawke (Dragon Age), Past Sexual Abuse, Past Sexual Assault, Past Suicide Attempt, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Post-traumatic amnesia, Recovery, Self-Harm, Slow Burn, Smut, Sort Of, Therapy, brooding elves, but modernized, follows a lot of the events of the game, graphic smut, my usual lol, the gang's all here
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-26
Updated: 2021-02-01
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:00:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 6
Words: 11,242
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27725837
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elo_elo/pseuds/elo_elo
Summary: He lets her hold him, head resting in her lap, the light of the city shimmering past them as the car drives. The dry air from the heat blowing over them, the ice on the windows spreading across the glass. Her fingers card through his hair. He exhales. The darkness of his memories feel far away. No longer written on his body. Distant in a way that feels almost safe. Satinalia carols play muted on the taxi’s radio. He inhales her. The scent of her perfume, the wet lingering smell of cigarette smoke. For once in his life, he closes his eyes, lets himself be drawn easily forward.Or Fenris meets Hawke in group therapy and, despite his best efforts, falls in love.
Relationships: Fenris/Female Hawke
Comments: 52
Kudos: 54





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This work is a little out of my comfort zone. I never blend modern au’s with more canon elements of the game and I’ve never written this pairing before. But it’s been percolating in my brain for a while and I decided to let it out into the world. I hope I can do these two justice and I hope you enjoy :) 
> 
> I know the tags are a doozy but I just wanted to cover my bases. There’s a lot of fluff and humor in this, I promise.

Fenris thinks she’s one of the counselors at first, all easy smiles. More comfortable here any of the other patients seem to be. She wanders in, fingers skimming over the card table they’ve set up with coffee and stale bagels, glancing over at the circle of chairs where he sits. Too tall and broad for the folding chair where they’ve put him. She’s dressed in leggings, a sweatshirt that hangs low on her thighs, frayed at the ends, a pair of scuffed sneakers. His first clue that she’s probably not one of the staff. That and counselors don’t come in late. Fifteen minutes late, he realizes, glancing over at the murky clock on the far wall. And they don’t tell off-color jokes like the one that’s just landed like a bomb on this dour crowd. Fenris only catches the back end of it. Something about burning buildings, about the fire code. The counselor leading the session blanches, sputters, and the woman sits down a few chairs down from him, apparently completely unphased by the way she’s just taken all the air out of the room. 

Which he can appreciate. At the very least it draws some of the attention off him. Because even the group’s lone qunari has been casting him sidelong glances since the group’s first meeting two weeks ago. It’s the tattoos, he knows. They draw attention and the long-sleeved shirts he’s been wearing lately don’t cover the markings on his neck, his fingers, his chin. He’s grown accustomed to tucking his chin, folding his hands. And the fact that he doesn’t speak, doesn’t share. He knows that draws attention too.

This new woman is just a slip of a thing - long, fawnish legs and bony fingers – but she seems intent on taking up as much space as possible. Crossing her legs on the seat so her knees jut outward, rolling her shoulders back, leaning her elbows on the back of the chair so she’s spread all out. “Now,” the counselor says, shooting a last withering look at the new woman before turning her attention again to the group, “since we’re all here, why don’t we get started.”

Fenris isn’t really listening. The counselor leading the session introduces the woman as new but he drifts off before he catches her name. Eyes snapping, on instinct, to the windows, to the room’s single door. _You’re not a bodyguard anymore, Fenris,_ his therapist told him only just a few days ago, the ticking cuckoo clock in his office making a racket in Fenris’ brain, _you have to decide now what you are._ Fenris scowls. This is ridiculous. All of it. A farce. Some saccharine niceness to try and beat back the wolves at the door. And it’s doing a piss poor job of that, Fenris thinks, gaze drifting from face to face in the circle of chairs. Everyone is crying, save the qunari and the new woman. And Fenris of course, who isn’t sure, as the dwarf woman beside him laughs through streaming tears, if he’s cried freely in all his life.

They’re talking about coping mechanisms today or maybe trauma bonding. Or maybe both. Fenris is still only half listening. The group is trauma-based, as far as he has been able to tell. Everyone with their own wound. The qunari lost his leg during the second insurgency in Seheron. Can’t sleep. Can’t ride the train. The dwarf woman lost both her parents in a car crash, has violent dreams about dying with them. Fenris shifts in the too-small chair. His wound feels open, obvious, bigger than all the others. None of this had been his idea. Though, he thinks, very little in his own life has been his idea. At least with Danarius that was up front. Danarius never pretended that anything he made Fenris do was for his own good. Which is exactly the way his caseworker presented this to him. Something for his own good. Group therapy in addition to individual therapy in addition to weekly meetings with the case worker. A way to feel, she’d said, less alone. So far it’s just made him feel angry. And more alone, if that had been possible. Separated out. Marked in an even more subtle way than the tattoos already mark him. He leaves these sessions feeling heavier than when he comes to them. Fenris supposes, crossing his arms over his chest and leaning back, he could have said no. He doesn’t have much practice with that. “I think we should all be cognizant of how much we’re talking.” Fenris settles back into the room, arms still crossed, his legs out long in front of him. The counselor levels a pointed look at the new woman. “So we can give others the space to share as well.”

“Sure, sure.” Her laughs triples her in size, fills up the whole room. Bawdy, really. Completely out of place here. “I’ve always been told I never know when to keep my mouth shut.”

She slips out as soon as the session ends, before Fenris even has the chance to unfold himself from the narrow chair. The qunari is over by the card table. On his fifth cup of coffee and eyeing one of the stale bagels. He’d heard on the train that the Free Marches have allied with the Qun, heard some talking head on the tv in the laundromat fretting that this would mean certain war with Tevinter. Fenris has seen more of them in the city lately, Qunari, seen too graffiti scrawled all across the train stations calling them beasts. Hard not to hear the drums of war when that’s all he’s heard his whole life. It hardly matters. Out of the corner of his eye one of the men lights a cigarette, flame curling up his fingers, sparking when it reaches the nail of his pointer finger. “No smoking inside please, Russ.” The counselor chides as she folds up the chairs. Fenris ducks away from both of them with a scowl.

Kirkwall is a shithole. All of Minrathous’ seedy underbelly with none of its glitter. The building his case worker put him up in a towering, concrete, Brutalist nightmare in a part of town that seems to have just as many rats as it has people. The grimy windows of the building blinking outward like the eyes of the beasts in those old Tevine tapestries. Inside, a labyrinth of stairs. Peeling wallpaper, murky colored carpet curling on the edges. His apartment is on the tenth floor, a view that overlooks absolutely nothing of note, nothing beautiful. The ceiling is too short, the light in the bathroom flickers. What meager furniture he has was donated by the _Center for Trafficking Awareness_. His pots and pans by _Male Survivor_. Names he’s sick of seeing now, shameful reminders of what he’s not even sure.

He hasn’t used the kitchen yet. Subsisting on a steady diet of sandwiches and boxed wine from the corner store a block down. Fenris sloughs off his coat, his shirt, leaves them both on the narrow kitchen table. He’s grimy from the train, should shower, but he doesn’t want to see his body tonight, doesn’t want to touch it. His tattoos have been aching lately. Fenris lays down on the bed, feet hanging off the end, his hands folded over his ribs. He opens his window a crack to let the cool night air in, tries to think about nothing. From the other side of the wall, his neighbors have started to fight. The train shivers loudly by.

He goes back to group the next week. Isn’t sure exactly why other than he seems to be unable to not follow an order, no matter how softly it’s given.

She doesn’t come in late this time. Is lingering by the card table nursing a cup of coffee when he walks in. She glances over at him, raising an eyebrow that he chooses to ignore. But when he’s seated again on one of those chairs that seem to be getting smaller with each passing week, he finds himself glancing backward toward her. She’s looking at the door, fingernails drumming on the Styrofoam cup. Dressed today in a pair of jeans, a sweater with sleeves that are too long for her, the same pair of scuffed sneakers. She looks tired, deep circles under her eyes that he hadn’t noticed before. But she still manages to make another bawdy joke as she takes her seat, the counselor coloring red to her roots. Fenris can’t help himself and his quiet chuckle draws her attention to him again. Their eyes meet. Hers are an almost unnerving blue set against her ruddy skin and inky hair, cut shaggy and short around her face. Fenris crosses his arms over his chest, turns away.

She’s by the back door when he leaves. On that narrow strip of old cobblestone that drops abruptly into the bay. Leaning up against the brick of the building, smoking a cigarette, eyes staring blankly out at the dark water, one hand stuffed into the pocket of her coat, the matted fur collar of it hiding the bottom half of her face. It’s more wet than cold out. A misting in the air that frays the streetlights at their edges. Fenris can barely see the water even though it’s only a few feet in front of him, nothing but choppy blackness. He turns to look back at her and finds her staring. Her eyes aren’t blank anymore, they’re sparkling. She winks at him and he stiffens, affronted. He hears her laugh, then hears her footsteps disappearing down the cobblestone. Fenris takes a long breath, slipping his hands into the pockets of his jeans. He looks up at the night sky. Behind him, the quiet chatter of the group hums.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title is from one of my favorite Mary Oliver poems. 
> 
> Thank you so much for reading :)


	2. Chapter 2

Her name is Hawke. Well, Marianne. But she corrected the counselor who first called her that and he’s not sure if it’s because he feels some genuine affection for the woman who has, twice now, completely upended the tomb-like sanctity of these sessions or if he just feels a pleasantly destructive impulse to play along with the quiet chaos she is sowing. Regardless, he slots her in as Hawke in his head.

And he feels a faint spike of something approaching excitement when he hears the door click behind him two minutes after they’ve started. Because the lead counselor for the day cornered him in that polite way social workers always seem to before the start of session, when he’d been standing rigid by the card table, holding a Styrofoam cup of coffee but not drinking it, that she would really like to hear him share this evening. Something he has no intention of doing. Something that Hawke’s chatty, bombastic presence will make that much easier.

But the energy in the room doesn’t shift when Hawke sits down a few chairs away from him. She says nothing as she crosses her legs under her, balancing her own cup of coffee on one knee before tossing it back and setting the now empty Styrofoam onto the floor. She pats both palms onto her knees like they’re a dog then squirms her hips around. No one seems to notice the jagged way she inhales, or the way her knuckles go white when she digs her nails into the fabric of her jeans around her knees. Except him. Fenris glances up at her face. She’s not looking anywhere really, just right at the ground at the center of the circle of chairs. There's a rim of red around her eyes, a puffiness that he realizes with a strange, distant horror means she’s been crying. Not now. Maybe not even recently but hard enough and long enough that it’s puffed up her eyes, reddened her nose. He looks away, suddenly perturbed by how closely he’d been examining her. Looks up at the clock. It’s been fifteen minutes since this session started and he hasn’t heard a word.

They have these meetings in a Chantry basement. A place that looks nothing at all like the ornate Tevene Chantrys Danarius would bring him to with their towering spires and the solemn heaviness of their stone walls. This Chantry is a squat little building with a wide parking lot out front, tucked between a Walgreens and a laundromat. The only sign of its religious purpose, the Andrastian sun on its roof. Inside, cream-colored walls and short, nondescript carpet. Framed pictures of smiling Chantry sisters that age with the decades as you walk down the main hall toward the basement door, a corkboard with a potluck signup sheet. The basement itself only a few short steps down, a sliding door across the wide room leading out to the back alley. The unfamiliarity of it all rankles, and soothes. Nothing here reminds him of anything at all. Not unless he looks down at his hands. Which he does, suddenly, as if called to. Fenris curls his fingers into fists but no matter which way he twists his hands, the tattoos seem to almost gleam. In Tevinter, he barely thought of them. Now he cannot stop. “Self-harm is most often a response to trauma.” He glances up at the counselor. She’s smiling, her arms open like those old mosaics of Andraste, palms down. “These behaviors don’t serve us, but neither does any shame we might feel about them.” The dwarven woman beside him shudders, crying, nodding vigorously. He glances over at Hawke. She scrunches up her nose like she’s smelled something awful, her knees pulled up now to her chest, arms wrapped tightly around them, the sleeves of her sweatshirt pulled low over her hands. She makes a noise that he can’t quite place. Something between a scoff and a laugh. The counselor turns to her. “Something to add, Marianne?”

Hawke unfolds herself. “I don’t have anything for you today, sorry. Can’t imagine how disappointed you must be.”

He has been to the corner store across from the Chantry enough times that the cashier knows him now, nods when Fenris slips inside. It smells like floor cleaner and mint gum and Fenris is careful to tuck his hands into his pockets, so the fluorescent lighting doesn’t shine on the white of his tattoos. He lingers for a moment in front of the glass cooler doors, trying not to catch his own reflection. He’s considering trying a new brand of wine, a chill rolling over him as he opens the cooler. It hadn’t occurred to him before that moment. To take time to decide. To pick something that he actually wants. He’s been, for weeks, just grabbing the first bottle on the shelf. He could be drinking piss for as little as he tastes the swill. Fenris’ fingers hover over the bottles. There’s a bottomless feeling growing inside of him. He feels small and young. And silly. He grabs the bottle closest to him, pushes the cooler door firmly closed.

It’s warmer tonight than it has been since he arrived here. Chilled, murky water running rivers along the sidewalk and street. Steam billowing from buildings and tailpipes. Still though, it’s colder than it would ever be in Minrathous and Fenris pulls his coat tighter around him as he heads toward the station.

There’s a mage standing just outside the turnstiles, wrapped tightly in a scarf, an upturned hat at his feet. A small crowd has gathered to watch him send a spark of flame into the air. He blows, sending a tuft of air across his palm, scattering the flame into little birds of light that shiver to the ground. Fenris grimaces, digging for the metro card in the pocket of his coat. His caseworker gave it to him, explained in rambling detail how to refill it. Fenris hadn’t been listening and lately each time he swipes it he feels a humiliating spike of terror that it won’t go through. That he’ll be left standing on the outside of the station, feeling just as he had that first morning in his case worker’s office. Like the rest of his life had been sheared off, just a howling, windy nothing on the end of it. But today it goes through and Fenris ducks a little as he heads inside so he doesn’t bump his head. Behind him, a dwarf ducks under the turnstile, flicking his cigarette into a shallow pool of water by the tracks, glancing briefly back at one of the station’s scuffed cameras. Fenris pulls his scarf up higher on his face, covering the tattoos along his chin.

He’s two stops from home when he sees her. The same faux fur collar, the same pixied dark hair. Fenris shifts a little to get a better view. She must live in the same neighborhood, he thinks, unsure why that matters at all.

Hawke’s on the other end of the car from him, staring intently again at nothing, one hand wrapped tightly around the pole. She’s narrows her eyes like she’s thinking, trying to figure something out. Fenris watches her tap her two fingers against her closed mouth. Rhythmic. Like she’s counting. “Have you heard?” A woman bumps up beside him, talking loudly into her phone, the thick roll of her Orlesian accent somehow amplifying the volume. “Tevinter closed their Free Marcher embassy.” Fenris frowns, stuffing his hands further into the pockets of his coat. “Yes, this morning, I heard on the news.” She tsks, brushing her hair back across the fur lining of her coat. “What else could it mean, hmmm? It certainly isn’t _good._ ” He glances up to where Hawke had stood only moment before only to find her gone. In her place, a qunari that Fenris clocks immediately as a mercenary, the other passengers giving him wide berth. 

The shower is too short for him. Which makes the already fraught process of cleaning himself even more uncomfortable. Hunched over as lukewarm water sluices down his body, forced to stare at the markings that had only months before meant nothing to him but now loom. It’s an ordeal. More than it should be.

Fenris steps out of the shower and closes his eyes, lets the water drip off his body onto the floor. Danarius would have beaten him for that. He stands a moment longer, until a shallow pool has formed at his feet.

Fenris wakes with his sheets twisted around him, one arms hanging off the side of the bed, fingers twisted in the carpet. He can’t remember falling asleep, but he can catch the faintest taste of a dream in the back of his thoughts. Something slippery and amorphous. Fearful in its lack of definition. He groans, sitting upright to begin untangling himself from the sheet. The plastic alarm clock on his bedside table blinks four am. The sun won’t rise for several hours. And then only in inches. In the winter, the sun only skims around Kirkwall’s horizon. In the summer, his case worker assured him, it stays light for days. A golden softness that he’d seen in pictures online when the perpetual evening had driven him so mad he’d gone to the public library to see for himself. Something to look forward to perhaps, though the idea of living that long, being here, drawing breath, into next year seems almost fanciful. The bottom will drop out eventually, he knows, it’s just the matter of how and when that he hasn’t yet worked out.

Fenris pads quietly across the floor of his apartment, not bothering to turn on the light. The streetlamps outside filter in enough for him to see. And he’s used it, besides. Waking early to prepare himself for Danarius. Moving silently through the dark. A dog barks from the street below. A lonely, singular sound. Even the trains run sparsely this late. Fenris washes out his mouth with wine.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading <3


	3. Chapter 3

It’s hard to remember. Maybe because even at the time it had been hard to understand. Watching Danarius’ back disappear through the crowd in Vyrantium and not following. Slipping away, the wounds from his brief time with the insurgents in Seheron still aching, a limp that slowed him as he slipped through those narrow alleyways. The impulse something so wholly out of his character that Danarius had not even looked back to make sure Fenris still followed. Not until, he imagines, it was long too late to stop him.

He still doesn’t know what made him run. Just that something snapped in his mind, something he could not name and cannot name. There had been so many better chances to flee. Fenris frowns, nostrils flaring. He turns the water faucet cold, holds his hands under it until the bones start to ache. This is the only way, he’s found, to pull him back to himself. Back to the narrow kitchen with the ceiling he nearly brushes against. There’s a guilt now, where there hadn’t been before. But the fear is fading. Fenris weighs an open bottle of wine in his hand. There are a few sips left inside it. He tips a bottle back to get the last. The fear, he thinks, was the only thing keeping him alive.

Kirkwall had been a spot on a map. A ticket he could afford. An impulsive answer to a clerk that was already eyeing him with suspicion, glancing toward the office phone.

It was far away. Two days on a ferry that tossed his stomach into his throat and six in a bus where what fitful sleep he got was pressed to its dusty, grimy windows. And Kirkwall was supposed to be cold, if the faded poster on the bus station was any indication. A photo from the eighties no doubt, faded, the paper brittle. A long stretch of water, iced over, the city beyond blanketed in a thick layer of white snow. Maybe it had been the promise of cold that most drew him as he stood there, rigid and quietly terrified, his hands mangling the faded bills in his pocket. It was then, and still is, hard to imagine Danarius tolerating the cold. Fenris, it turns out, is not much better at it. He’s yet to see much snow, or at least any like he’d seen in the picture. But the caseworker assured him a week ago that the ice and slush that has drenched his only pair of sneakers is _a November thing._ December is just a few weeks away. Fenris isn’t sure why that matters so much to him.

The milk in his fridge has gone bad. He watches in the flicker of fluorescence above his sink as the chunks disappear down the drain. The smell of commercial rot is almost pleasant. A benign sort of destruction. There was always something so serious about Minrathous, the whole of Tevinter really. A self-importance that seemed to bleed out from the stone, the stained glass. Seheron had been, in its way, the same. Dust and shrapnel so thick it settled like a fog, the faint, dark outlines of the rubble like distant mountains. There’d been almost nothing left of the place and that absence, that ruin, had carried its own sense of importance. Out of time. A sensation he can only identify now because Kirkwall feels so solidly _in_ time. The cobblestone streets cracked and patched with asphalt. The old buildings from the time of the second inquisition butting up against the walls of corporate glass. The main cathedral at the center of the city is perched beside a building with a McDonald’s in its basement, the glow of the yellow arches often rivaling the holy lights from inside. The Chantry where he goes for group has a wall of vending machines by the door. Hawke missed the last group therapy session. Fenris doesn’t know why that matters. Or why he’s thinking about it as he lingers in his dingy kitchen, his thoughts so wild they blend together. A stream of nonsense. She is the only person in group therapy whose name he knows. Maybe he’s lonely. Fenris pauses, milk carton still in his hand. Lonely. Maybe. He never craved Danarius’ company but it had been, at least, company. A presence. The feeling of another person. He tosses the carton then moves the apartment’s dented kettle onto one of the stove’s burners, then off again. He sighs, palms flat against the counter. His touch had been…Fenris pinches the ridge of his nose. Lately his memories have been so jagged. Everything cast in a new light. So bright and jarring it blinds him. He had known, of course, before this. Could feel the wrongness of everything Danarius had ever done deep in is bones. But it’s not in his bones anymore. He feels it like pinpricks across his skin, like a flash behind his eyes. It has made the solid wall of nothing at the back of his memory come into singular focus.

Trauma, he’s been told. First from his caseworker, then from the psychologist she referred him to. He’d sat in the man’s sterile office just a week after that Fereldan cop scraped him off the floor of an old warehouse in Kirkwall’s meatpacking district, still aching, trying to hide the tremor in his body. The diagnosis of post-traumatic amnesia had meant nothing to him at the time. But it’s grown since then. Taken on a shape that has, in the quiet corporate banality of this city, become almost sublime. Fenris opens the fridge. Closes it. The neighbors are fighting again, tv turned off. _What’s the first thing you can remember?_ Fenris winces. He doesn’t think about it often. He thinks about it all the time. He opens the fridge again. Just stares. A carton of eggs, a few slices of cheese each wrapped in plastic. His caseworker bought it. There’s nothing in this fridge, in this entire apartment, that belongs to him, that he would want to keep. The tv’s on again. He can hear it through the wall. Fenris leans heavily on the counter, closes his eyes.

They’d kept waking him up. Sprawled out on the floor in one of the rooms in Danarius’ dense, labyrinthine basement, the concrete so hard on his knees. They’d kept waking him up. Shaking him, slapping him. Rubbing a fine white powder on his gums until his ears rang and light pulsed from behind his eyes. They wanted him to watch. The blank horror of the nothing in his brain filled flush with the physical exertion of enduring. _This is my body,_ he’d thought, going nowhere, _mine._ And yet it hadn’t been, so obviously. No one touches a man who owns himself the way they touched him.

They held him kneeling so he could watch them tattoo. The whirring of the machine like a swarm. Every muscle so tense it felt as though they would strip themselves clean from his bone. Blood swimming with silvery ink. A pain that seemed to rocket through his veins. _Kill me,_ he remembers saying, his own voice so small, so foreign to his ears, _please just kill me. What have I done to you?_ They’d left him to lay in his own vomit, to feel the ache of the new skin they’d given him. Fenris kneads at the bridge of his nose like he can pull the thoughts physically from his brain. Through the wall, he can hear the poppy jingle of the evening news.

He tells himself he’s headed to the waterfront because the neighbors have started fighting again. But really, he wants to see that spot again. The one from the poster in the Minrathous bus depot. The impulse embarrasses him but he’s flush with wine, softened by the taste of it. His own embarrassment feels irrelevant. Fenris releases it, lets himself be rocked by the sway of the train.

The first time he went was a month after he arrived. Two weeks after cops brought him into adult protective services, after he’d been poked and prodded, screened and catalogued. After they brought him to that apartment and left with a few bags of groceries and a too-short pair of jeans, a coat with a patch in one elbow. It was the second night. He’d woken in a terror so in his body that he hadn’t been able to calm down. Like the weight of what he’d done, the full weight of it, had come crashing down onto him all once. He’d been homesick for Danarius’ touch, an acerbic, violent longing. It had been too much to contain in that narrow apartment.

He rode the trains for most of the night, along one line, then the next. A sullen, sniffling minotaur winding his way through Kirkwall when, in pieces, the waterfront came into view. The skyscrapers growing sparser and sparser, the moon reflecting low in the water through their towers until the train broke out like a bird and the ocean was all he could see, the ornate, colorful tops of Old Town like coral at its base. 

There wasn’t snow like in the picture, but when he stepped out into that frigid night something sparkled inside of him. Excitement and terror braided together until they were almost indistinguishable. Freedom, surely. He’d felt himself radiate.

Fenris told his therapist a few days later, in a moment of weak, loose-mouthed vulnerability, that he’d gotten onto the train in the hopes of being found. Picked up by a trafficker, some bounty hunter. An oversized assessment of his own importance, of the money Danarius might have put up to get him back. He’d wanted to be dragged back to Minrathous where at least he could say that nothing happening to him had been his own choice, he could be free from the burden of _that._

He doesn’t feel that way anymore, at least not in the same way. Standing at that vantage had done something to him. Even if it was something small. And he needs that again. Needs to replicate that feeling. Which is why he takes the train all the way to Old Town, muscles his way through an evening crowd dense with both chattery tourists and the weary faces of night laborers heading for the harbor, their breath blooming out in front of them into the night air. He winds through the crowd with a familiarity that feels out of place until he slips out toward the city center. The air smells like roasting nuts and cinnamon. He hadn’t noticed that before. They’re erecting a Satinalia tree in the center of the square, just bones now, a few boughs of pine strung along wooden supports. And he’s about to go take a closer look, try to catch the salted scent of the sea, when he sees her. Hawke. It’s the coat really, that ratty fur collar that draws his attention to her at first. And it takes a few moments for his brain to catch up. Maybe because she’s dressed differently than he’s seen her before. He spots the glittering hem of a dress peeking out from the bottom of her coat, dark tights over her long legs. She’s leaned up against the brick of a nearby building, clicking one pointed heel against the cobblestone, rhythmic, like she's counting, the neon of the sign above casting a glow like a halo over her dark hair. _The Hanged Man._ He snorts. What a name. Maybe a little too on the nose for him. But he can’t seem to get his feet back under him, stands for a what feels like forever on the street just watching. The smoke from her cigarette plumes upward. It makes her look warm. The glow from the bar too. The open door leads to a set of stairs going down but light still pours out onto the street, filtering gold against the blue of the night. Maker she looks so warm. Wreathed in the smoke from her cigarette, from the light all around her. The loneliness inside of him feels as vast the sea that stretches out from Kirkwall’s harbor. But there’s a safety in that, he knows. A safety that has him ducking into the shadows back toward the station, a safety that keeps him from looking back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading <3


	4. Chapter 4

The knock wakes him. A loud pounding that echoes through his apartment and sends him spilling out of his bed, caught still in the teeth of a dream already slipping from his memory. Tevinter and Kirkwall fray together at their ends. His bed is the spot at Danarius’ feet. Danarius is knocking. Danarius is angry. Daniarus will _kill_ him. The radiator clangs like a beating. The room is still and empty. The knock sounds again. Fenris nearly forgets to put on a shirt before he answers the door.

He recognizes the dwarf by his voice. Hears it every night through their thin walls. It is no surprise to Fenris then, with the tenor of their fucking and fighting, that he looks as he does. Coarse red hair to his shoulders, his beard in two braids. His skin so scarred and pockmarked it looks like the gnarled bark of a tree. Fenris has seen scars like that before. Back in Minrathous, when Danarius hired a deserter from the Legion of the Dead to stand beside Fenris at one of his galas, decked in full regalia. A display to show his guests, Fenris assumed, that Danarius’ reach went even into the bowels of the earth. The man had smelled like turned vinegar, had a tremor in both hands.

“You just get up?”

Fenris blinks at him. “Um.” He turns to look out the thin window above his bed. It’s hard to tell what time it is, if it’s morning or afternoon, the sun skimming along the sky, muted from the haze. Fenris doesn’t remember falling asleep. The bile at the base of his throat tastes like wine.

“Don’t matter, I guess.” The dwarf shrugs. “Listen, just wanted to let you know that Becca called the landlord and they said they’re gonna do something about the heat later today. Wouldn’t hold your breath though. A plane could hit this fucking shithole and these slumlords would tell us they’re waiting on a part. Anyway, just wanted to let ya know.”

“Becca?” Fenris narrows his eyes. “The heat?” But the dwarf is already heading back down the hall. Fenris closes the door. He feels woozy. Like he slept too hard, too deeply. He exhales and his breath plumes in front of him. His palm feels chilled against the door and then his hand, and then his whole body as if it’s come back to life in inches. Fenris shivers. Just one long shiver all down this body. He can see, when he turns, the faint glitter of ice on his window and he feels suddenly rigid with cold. A sensation so foreign, so deeply, deeply unpleasant that he can barely stand it. That dread rising up inside of him again, sharp in every part. He can’t stay here. In the cold. Can’t stay another minute.

The diner is between his apartment and the Old Town stop, almost exactly. He’s never been before but there had been something about the neon filtering blue and yellow through the train’s grimy windows that had drawn him, had him stepping off the train into the wet cold.

The sun is setting now, as he sits in the booth closest to the front window, a wide arc of light falling over the bay. This part of town seems to be mostly industrial. Boats mooring onto the thick concrete slab of the dock, weatherworn faces spilling out, the hazy pale color of twilight at their backs.

He’d either fallen asleep that morning or slept through both the night and the day and the fact that he can’t remember which settles like an itch in the back of his brain. Fenris moves his coffee cup from one hand to the other. The menu at the diner is too big – page after laminated page – and his brain seized up just by looking at it. All the choices, the old faded pictures of food, made him feel almost shaky, woozy. So he’d ordered coffee even though his stomach is growling. And now that it’s here, he’s finding it hard to drink it, hard to even swallow. If he’s ever felt like that before, he can’t remember it. Probably he hasn’t, he decides, finally managing a sip of coffee, the burnt taste settling in the back of his throat. He reaches for a sugar packet, spills some over the side of the up when he tears it open. This level of weakness wouldn’t have been tolerated back in Minrathous, wouldn’t have even been an option.

Fenris sits a little back in the booth, the plasticky fabric squeaking at the movement. He takes another sip, then another, letting it warm him from the inside. Some, at least. His fingers have always been cold, toes frigid. Even in Tevinter. The waitress comes back over and tops off his cup without a word. She’s heavily pregnant, has one chipped horn. He tries not to meet her eyes, instead tries to look everywhere at once. At the teenage elf in the booth across from him talking on the phone; at the potbellied man behind the counter leaning heavily on one arm, gazing up at the box tv secured to the wall near the ceiling. The man reaches for a remote by a group of saltshakers and turns the tv up, the sound breaking loudly through the diner’s ambient hum. _If Tevinter refuses to crackdown on the rampant human trafficking within its border we are going to have to take that to mean the leadership tacitly supports it._ The man on tv looks like a politician, suited and stiff. _The UN is going to have no choice but to recommend sanctions. It doesn’t matter how powerful their economy is, this is a matter of human rights and eventually we have to draw a hard line in the sand. We have to be the good guys._ Fenris bristles. He doesn’t want to watch this, listen to this. Like these Marcher bumpkins have any idea what they’re talking about. How could they?

He turns back to his coffee and finds himself, suddenly, shockingly, face to face with Hawke. She’s sitting across the table from him, chin resting on one hand, as if it were the most natural thing in the world that she would be here, sharing his table. He hadn’t heard her sit down, hadn’t seen her out of the corner of his eyes.

Fenris bites back a sudden, almost instinctual urge to put his hands on her, to haul her out of her seat. It’s frightening in its intensity, honed to second nature by all those years at Danarius’ feet. But he doesn’t handle her, he just rocks backward in the booth, releasing his coffee cup, and says a quiet _Maker._ It’s so mundane it almost surprises him.

But if Hawke has noticed any kind of internal struggle, he doesn’t see it. Her eyes trained on him with such intensity he wonders if _Hawke_ is a last name or a nickname. She’s in the same coat she always is, a reddish sweater peeking out from behind her zipper, her hair just a little tousled from the wind. “Hi.” One side of her mouth ticks up. She flicks the empty sugar packet across the table and, undeterred by Fenris’ stony silence, keeps talking. “We keep running into each other.” She picks up the table’s ketchup bottle, feigns reading the back. From this angle, in this light, the soft lines of her face look almost like knifepoints. She’s an attractive woman, Fenris thinks, though he immediately relinquishes the thought. It’s an appraisal, one that echoes through his mind in Danarius’ voice. One he doesn’t care to make, has no use for. “You’re not as sly as you think you are.” Fenris straightens, unsure what she means, suddenly even more on edge. She turns the bottle in her hand, sets it down, then starts to page through the menu. Fenris glances at the man behind the counter but he’s still craned up to watch the tv. The elven teenager is gone. “Thought I recognized you that first time on the train, but I wasn’t sure.” She turns to finally look at him, a sly smile on her face. “But now I’m sure. You’re hard to miss.” She laughs, the sound almost too loud, drawing attention. Fenris flinches. “Group therapy. What are the odds? We’re probably not supposed to say that in public, are we? Are you a friend of Bill and all that.”

Fenris blinks at her. “What?”

Hawke just laughs, undeterred. “AA joke. My dad was in AA.” She waves her hand dismissively. “Doesn’t matter.” She settles, hands clasped, forearms on the table. A mock seriousness that, despite himself, puts Fenris just a little more at ease. “I don’t think I ever caught your name.”

The ease evaporates. Fenris sits in stony silence, body rigid. Hawke cocks her head, raises both eyebrows. He clears his throat. “Why do you want my name?”

Hawke’s eyes soften, just for a moment, before she’s grinning again, wicked. “Why did you follow me off the train.”

Fenris rocks back. “I…”

“Ah, ah, ah.” She wags her finger in the air, “not as sneaky as he thinks he is.”

He frowns. “Didn’t.”

“Sure.” She’s fussing with the sugar packet again, worrying the edges of it with her nails. “Coincidences. I like those too. But the fact remains that we keep running into each other. Must be something to that, right? We should at least know each other’s names.” She flicks the sugar packet into the air and then with a clean pop a lick of flame curls across her finger, sets the paper alight. It’s ash in seconds, the quick scent of a dying candle on the air. “Don’t you think?”

Fenris cannot hide his revulsion, cannot hide the way her magic lingers in the booth, pulses along his tattoos. “You’re a mage.”

“So they tell me.” Fenris is so rigid he can barely breathe and Hawke seems to suddenly notice. She sits a little up, eyes narrowing curiously. “Is that…a problem?”

“No.” Fenris stands. He yanks his coat over his shoulders. Hawke doesn’t move, just looks up at him, those eyes of her so sharp, so piercing, he can barely stand to look. He walks quickly past, the cold air washing over him as he opens the door. He doesn’t look back.

Fenris vomits on the platform for the green line. All bile and black coffee. He lets his knees buckle, lets his hands shake. He feels like he is dying. Or maybe he just wishes he was. He feels like – if he could stand straight, if he could breathe, if the world would stop trembling – he would buy the first ticket back to Tevinter. Where no mage could touch him but the one who already had.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading <3


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy New Year everyone! Here's to sending 2020 to hell where it belongs and to hope for a new year that is, even in inches, better.

“A panic attack.”

Fenris glances up from where he’s been slumped in this chair, studying the closely cropped carpet. His therapist, an old man whose name he still can’t seem to remember, sits with his back to the room’s large window. The hazy early morning light filtering along the edges of his high-backed chair. The office is on the twentieth floor of one of those mirrored office buildings on the edge of Old Town. So high up that all Fenris can see out the windows is the bare ocean – no boats, no harbor. It gives him the feeling that he is drifting in space, tethered nowhere. It’s always a relief when he steps back out onto the street, like the noise and grime of the city can remove all traces of the office’s recycled air, its almost hallowed quiet. He’s steeped in it now. Fenris narrows his eyes at the man. “What?”

“What you’ve described sounds like a panic attack.”

“I’m not…” He looks back down at the carpet. It’s a color he can’t describe. No flourish to it. Blue and brown and green all closely knit. Evocative of nothing. “Sure.”

The silence stretches long between them. Fenris hears the squeak of leather as the man shifts in his chair. “Why do you think magic is a trigger for you?”

Fenris pauses. He looks up, peering through his hair. The therapist stiffens, just barely. Something so minor that if Fenris had not had it beat into him to notice, he would not have. But he does and it unsettles him. And maybe for the first time since he arrived here in this city, he is suddenly very aware of how he must look. Hulking, menacing. Too tall and broad for the chair, his tattoos flashing in the sunlight. A hard bolt of terror. A nightmare. And yet. _Why do you think magic is a trigger for you?_ He feels shrunken in the face of it. The sharp tendrils of lyrium ripping at his seams. The smell of it. So deep in his nostrils it would sicken him as he tried to sleep. Pain that seemed to come from inside himself, pain that he had brought onto himself. Pain so at home in the sharp edges of his body. “Mages are different in Tevinter.” It’s more honest than he means to be, especially when he means to say nothing, to soak in his own stony silence, to wear this man down until he lets him go. But now Fenris has spoken and just like in the dim, echoing halls of Danarius’ estate, he has to own it. He sits up, faces the man fully. “I just mean…” Fenris swallows, his forearms resting on his thighs. He flexes his fingers. “Mages are treated differently here.”

His therapist seems to process that for a moment, folding his hands over his crossed knee. Outside, the haze has dissipated some, the sun filtering more brightly through the windows than when he arrived. “That’s true.” His voice is even, measured. Like a man trying to reason with a wild animal. “I imagine that’s strange for you. To see mages folded so mundanely into the fabric of our society. Not put on a pedestal as in Tevinter or maligned in Par Vollen, locked away in institutions.” Fenris’ noise twitches. Strange, he thinks, that this man would not mention Seheron, what with how often he’s seen it on the news here. Seheron where magic runs like blood down the streets, where it glitters through the dust and the ash. Where it is a weapon and a trap in the same breath. But of course he wouldn’t. What would he know of Seheron? What could he possibly know? Out of sight and out of mind. Like everything else in this city. Fenris imagines he is the most dangerous thing this man deals with, maybe has ever dealt with. “You should know, however,” he sets his clipboard down, folds his hands around his knee. He’s trying to look approachable, Fenris thinks, non-threatening. Fenris could snap him in half. The thought rising up so suddenly and violently that Fenris jerks upright. It’s terrifying, the thought of himself. The man in front of him has not noticed, his hands still folded over his crossed knee, eyes locked on his but unseeing.. “Free Marcher mages are not without restrictions. They attend special schools. Are governed by special laws. They are not a threat to yo-“

“I don’t give a shit about mages.” His voice booms, fills the whole room. And when he comes back to himself, he is halfway out of the chair, his fingers gripping the arms of it. Fenris recoils from himself, his own body brought into stark repose in the light blandness of the room. His overreaction echoing. “I…” He trails off, leaning a little back in the seat. He feels…embarrassed almost. Raw.

To his surprise, the man in front of him seems completely unphased. He leans back in his high-backed chair and takes a deep breath. “You seem to have a very strong reaction to them for them to be something you don’t _give a shit_ about.” Fenris purses his lips. He can see, in his mind’s eye, the color in Danarius’ eyes drain out, go cold, the smell of lyrium faint in the air. And then somewhere deeper, darker, inside himself he finds Hadriana’s dark hair between his fingers. Hers a name he hasn’t allowed himself to speak, to even think about. Until now. Here in the dull light of this room where he feels blown open, overexamined. He can feel her hand between his legs, nails along his shaft, just the threat of pain, a warning. Her fingers hum with magic and he feels, locked in that memory, like he wants to scream, like he wants to cry like a child. It’s a chilled feeling, cold to his bones. The ice of her magic skimming across his already tender skin. His therapist is looking at him, motionless, face betraying nothing. Offering no tether for Fenris to grab hold of, awash in a sea of his own memories. Drowning. And then, suddenly, from nowhere, Fenris is sitting back in that booth. And there’s Hawke, across from him. No chill in those pale eyes. It’s startling that he’s thinking of her, here of all places, on the tail end of _that_ memory. He can see her so vividly it’s as if she’s there in front of him. Half-cocked grin, one hand hovering in the air, long, nimble fingers. He watches, as if in slow motion, that flame curl along her fingers. It flickers at the tips. Every part of her looks warm, as if she were burning up from the inside. “Fenris.” Fenris twitches up to look at him. He’s a little more forward now, the light behind him hazy again. “You’re safe here. I want you to know that. Safe to speak your mind. _Physically_ safe.” He couldn’t feel further from but when he imagines that diner again something inside him unfurls. The ambient sound of the tv in the background; the young elf on her phone; the steam rising from his coffee. And Hawke. This woman that he’s only spoken to once. This mage. And the flames licking up the side of her hand.

He’s almost embarrassed coming down those few steps into the Chantry’s basement. Embarrassed that he would think of her in a moment where his brain seemed to be cracking under the weight of old memories. So much so that he’d almost mentioned it to his therapist. Almost.

Instead, he’d just used his tracphone’s crawling internet on the train home. Found articles on transference and fantasy in post-traumatic dissociation. He’d struggled to read them, the letters blurring and mixing before he finally gave up. But even the little he’d been able to glean didn’t seem right. He thought, and thinks now as he stands at the mouth of the carpeted basement, that he can’t stop thinking about her because of the way she seems to move through the world. Almost effortless. Which he envies. Deeply. A sort of surety that she will land on her feet no matter which ledges she walks off. Effortless. Which she looks as she hovers over the card table, fingers skimming across bagels and donuts before selecting one and plopping it into her mouth, letting it hang from her teeth like a dog as she pours herself a cup of coffee. She’s in the same jeans she always wears, this time in an even bigger sweater. One that clearly belongs to a man, or a qunari, the hem settling just above her knees.

Fenris is not sure of his own motivations as he approaches. And he tries not to be. Tries to just let himself move through the world. But when he comes up beside her and says, in the low baritone of his voice, _I’m Fenris,_ Hawke seems to jump nearly out of her skin. Seems so absolutely startled that he regrets telling her his name, regrets speaking to her at all. _You’re not charming,_ Danarius told him once, _you have no need to be._

But Hawke recovers quickly, bumping out her hip and taking the donut from between her teeth. “Fenris, huh? Are you from Tevinter or are you from Tevinter?” She wipes her hand on her sweater then holds it out. “Hawke. Glad we’re finally being introduced.” Fenris hesitates, then takes it. The room is starting to fill now. A few people settling into their chairs, a few more lingering around the card table that Hawke has effectively blocked with her body. But she makes no move to get out of their way so Fenris doesn’t either. She has a firm handshake for such a slight woman, almost crushing.

When she releases his hand, Fenris tucks it back into the pocket of his jeans. “I wanted to apologize,” he says, clearing his throat, “for leaving so abruptly the other day.”

Hawke just shrugs, takes a bite of her donut. “A man’s gotta go, a man’s gotta go.” She levels her coffee at him. “You’re welcome, by the way.” Fenris cocks his head. “I paid for your coffee.”

Fenris stiffens. “I apologize, I-“

“So polite.” She takes a sip of her coffee. “But don’t worry about it. Hit me back sometime.” Fenris blinks at her. He feels in over his head, taken up by some great wave. But it doesn’t…scare him like maybe it should. It doesn’t scare him at all. Danarius told him once that he had a good sense of people, something innate in him. But he couldn’t have, could he? Or he wouldn’t have ended up in Danarius’ gasp to begin with. Hawke glances over at the therapist, sitting now at the head of the circle. All of the people waiting on coffee have given up and taken their seats. Hawke lowers her voice. “Why do we keep coming here, huh?” Fenris has no answer for that, struggles to think of something to say in response as he turns to look at the circle of chairs then back at her. But Hawke doesn’t seem to need his reply. She glances up at him. “When there are so many more effective ways to figure out our problems.” She takes a sip of coffee, raises a single eyebrow. “Do you drink?” He tries not to chuckle. He can still taste the remnants of last night’s bottle of wine at the back of his throat. “I know a great place for that.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading <3


	6. Chapter 6

He asks no questions as she leads him onto the train. And the realization jars him. That he has gone so easily along with her, has not even asked her where she is taking him, has said almost nothing since they left the chantry. She has a certain magnetism to her. A flurry of talking and laughter, her hands hummingbird quick. But the magnitude of it all in dawning on him now in the quiet rush of the train. Fenris curls both hands over the train’s pole, the chill of it almost painful against his palms. The train takes a long, wide curve on the track and Fenris realizes, as a dwarven woman wrestling a pram onto the train casts him a backward glance, that he must look ridiculous. Nearly as tall as the train, resting all his weight on this narrow pole, knuckles white through his skin with how tightly he’s holding onto it. Humiliating, really, that he should feel so unmoored. So fantastically out of his depth. And for what? Why?

“Easy.” He turns to Hawke. She’s settled in one of the frayed seats behind him, legs half-crossed, fingers curled over the toes of her shoes. She looks up at him, blows to try and get some of the hair out of her face then laughs, almost sheepishly. “You look positively fraught.”

“I…” Fenris straightens up. He releases one hand from around the pole, glances around to better get his bearings. The trains here always seem wet on the inside. Like the snow tracked in from outside has evaporated up toward the ceiling, come raining back down in a fine mist. Everyone on board is bundled up, curled around themselves. Miserable and cold. Outside, the city blurs by. Blues and blacks and cement greys. “I’m fine,” he says stiffly.

“Cool, cool. But like you can actually relax, you know. If you feel like it.” He hears her take a long breath behind him. “No nut jobs in this car, I checked.” And he does – to his shock – chill out. Some. His shoulders sloping, chest releasing. Soothed in the cleanest sense of that word. And the realization makes him tense immediately back up. Danarius had always soothed him. His mere presence a comfort. Even in his darkest rages. His brutality so familiar. Like a home. Before Seheron. Of course. Something about those sand-swept dunes had cleansed him of all that. Danarius’ presence upon his return chaffed, crowded. He’d drawn away from him, quietly recoiled.. The train comes shuddering to a stop. A few more people get on, tightening the space. The scent of something frying wafts in through the open train doors. He can see, through the condensation on the windows, a pretzel stand near the tracks. He’s never had one, though he’s seen several kiosks like that since his arrival in the city. He can only imagine what they might taste like with their glistening, burnished exterior. Fenris has the sudden urge to ask Hawke about them, a childish impulse that fades so quickly he is left, facing her, with nothing to say. But Hawke is staring off into the distance now, clacking her teeth against one thumbnail. Paying him no attention at all, lost entirely to her own thoughts. She catches him looking, winks in such a long, exaggerated way it pulls up one side of her face. Fenris feels…he isn’t sure. The train lurches forward. Fenris again tightens his grip on the pole, lets his head rest on the cool metal.

He knows where they are going. Or assumes he does. Though, as the train reaches the central station stop and Hawke rises to her feet, just the thought is another reminder that he’s following her blindly into this city. But it’s cold out and his apartment is colder. And if they’re heading to the bar he saw her outside of almost a week ago now, tapping rhythm against the cobblestones, the memory of warmth filtering up those stairs is enough to keep him following her, even if he does spare a few chance glances behind him as he does.

Fenris looks over at the city square as they leave the concrete station and head out into the night. It’s warmer than it’s been since he arrived and though his breath still plumes in front of him as he walks, a heavy fog had laid itself thick over the city. The lights of the buildings and the massive Satinalia tree at the center of the square blink blearily through it. Beneath his feet, the slush has become rivers of chilled water. It soaks in through his socks. Hawke slips through the crowd, narrow and quick, but every so often she’ll turn back to look at him, waggling her eyebrows when their eyes meet. He doesn’t know how to respond to it. Cannot think of a single time in what little memory he has of his life where he’s encountered a situation at all like this. _Ridiculous_ , this woman. Everything about her. Where they met, her performance at the diner. This open, ridiculous invitation to go out with her when she doesn’t know him, doesn’t know what kind of danger he could be. The bar she’s taking him to, _The Hanged Man_ in blinking neon. Ridiculous too.

Fenris has to duck his head to avoid smacking it against the open doorframe. The stairs down are narrow, made of old wood that sags a little in the middle. The air inside is lit orange, red. Like the inside of a lantern, beating back the dark. Even before they reach the bar’s entrance, he can smell a strong whiff of cigarette smoke, sour liquor.

The bar itself is no better lit than the narrow hallway that preceded it. A wide space, made small by its low ceiling and ambient darkness. It’s dust, smokey. But warm and Fenris can’t deny there’s something almost homey about it. The old tables, the heavy bar with its low lights. Hawke certainly seems comfortable here, winding through the tables like she’s done it a hundred times. She yells something Fenris misses over the din of the bar and the bartender waves at her, throwing his head back and laughing. The sound has drawn the attention of a few of the patrons and they all seem to know her, laughing and waving, some nodding their heads in quiet acknowledgment. They nod at Fenris too. Which startles him. Because he’s used to being seen but rarely, rarely acknowledged. He doesn’t know what to do with it. Goes rigid, looks straight ahead like he would at Danarius’ side. And it’s that echo that brings him hard back into himself. In a bar he’s never been with a woman he doesn’t know; heading back toward a squat set of stairs at the far end of the bar, shrouded in convenient darkness. It occurs to him, in inches, that maybe Hawke is not who he thinks she is. That he doesn’t even have the faintest idea who he thinks she is, actually. She could be a bounty hunter. Or a slaver. Skulking around those therapy sessions to do reconnaissance, to gain his trust, to bring him here. She has such dark hair, black as spilled ink. Not at all unlike Hadriana’s. Not at all. But before Fenris can think or act or run, Hawke opens a door at the top of that short staircase and all the fear bleeds out of him. Beyond the door, a small room with a high ceiling. A bay window on one side, stained glass so dark and intricate he can’t see through it. A heavy, rounded wooden table at the center. And around it, three very, _very_ drunk people who look as far from Tevinter slavers as Fenris can imagine. Hawke looks over her shoulder at him, winks. “Step inside my office.”

“Are you Dalish?” It comes out in one long slur. She smiles at the end of it, leaning heavily on one dainty hand. Her eyes are so large and so brightly green that they make even her hawkish nose and the intricate Dalish markings across her cheeks and forehead look almost unremarkable. Her accent such a mix he wonders if she grew up nomadic.

“Do I look Dalish to you?”

The woman cocks her head, narrows her eyes just slightly, like she’s thinking very, very hard. “Yes, very much so.”

Fenris flares his nostrils and rolls his eyes, saying nothing, He leans back into the heavy oak chair where Hawke’s sat him by her side. She’s on maybe her sixth beer but it’s nothing compared to what he imagines most of the others have had to drink. With the sloppy, drooping they’re talking, leaning heavily on their hands. Across the table from them, a broad musclebound boy is getting louder with each sip, practically shouting. About nothing really. About everything. He and Hawke have the same color eyes and she ribs him which such ferocity he wonders if they’re perhaps related. The stoic woman in the corner is most certainly not, her neat bob a pale shock of red. And she doesn’t seem all that drunk either, nursing the same beer she had when he arrived. Fenris hasn’t caught any of their names even after two rounds of drunken introduction. And he’s probably too drunk now to remember if they were to introduce themselves again. He’s never drunk with others, he realizes. Was never permitted to in Tevinter, drank only alone in these first months in Kirkwall. And he’s mulling that over, trying to decide if it matters or not, if it’s an occasion he should mark in his memory, when the door swings open. Fenris nearly jumps out of his own skin. But he’s been slowed by the beer and by the time he makes any move to act, the door is closed again, a dwarf standing at the end of the table, sloughing off his coat.

“Varric!” The elven woman calls out, her head sinking deeper between her hands.

“The very one, Daisy. You save me some beer?” The elf just laughs, hiccups a little Varric skims some beer off the man with Hawke’s eyes, much to his loud indignation, then plops down at the head of the table, squat legs up on it. Fenris settles back into his chair. Hawke raises a single eyebrow at him. The dwarf orders a beer when the waitress pokes her head into the room, then scans the table, eyes settling on Fenris. “New guy, huh?”

Hawke smiles slyly, gesturing toward him. “Varric, meet Fenris.”

Fenris swallows, nods his head. Varric cocks his head and smiles then turns to give Hawk an appraising look. “What the hell are you dressed like that for? They just let you out of rehab?”

Hawke laughs, pulling one leg up to rest her arm on. “Yes, quite literally.”

“Is that where you met him Hawke?” The woman in the corner finally speaks, her voice measured, almost quiet.

.Hawke laughs again, a light, dismissive sound. “Of course not. We met on the train.” The woman eyes him, raises her eyebrows as if to say _sure, why not?_ Fenris glances over at Hawke, wonders if she is trying to save him or herself some embarrassment. Wonders if that should make him feel some kind of way. She straightens up, shivering like a little bird, then settles back and takes a long swig of beer. “So, where’s Anders? Figured you’d be picking him up on your way.”

Varric clears his throat. “Nah, not tonight. Blondie’s busy.”

Hawke cocks her head, rises a little in her seat and Fenris sees again what he had seen so briefly on the train, that second time in group. A quick slip of the charm, one she doesn’t immediately recover from. “Busy or?”

The dwarf’s face softens a little. “Just busy.”

Hawke leans back in her seat. “Oh.” The conversation seems to move forward without her, the question still hanging half answered in the air, meandering softly away from it. Hawke turns to Fenris, her head nodding a little, like the booze is just hitting her fully. “Everybody’s busy these days huh?” She has pretty lips. Wide and full. A little wet from the beer. He doesn’t know what to do with the thought, bubbling up from some nowhere place in his brain. And he doesn’t know how to answer her. So he just nods, takes a long pull of beer from his glass. “Hey,” she says, her voice a little quieter, a little more serious. “You doing okay?”

The question startles him. He’s not sure he’s been asked it before, at least not in earnest like this, not by someone paid to do it. He blinks at her then straightens, taking a breath. “I’m fine,” he says, taking another sip of his beer, “I’m fine.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading <3


End file.
